Tuesday, July 14, 2009

The miracle of Goldman Sachs

The G&M notes the "miraculous recovery" of Goldman Sachs, "expected to report Tuesday that it made a profit of more than $2-billion US in the March to June period – possibly its best quarter in two years."

It's a freakin' miracle alright - just like the miracle of the cups and ball trick.

Or, as Matt Taibbi writes in Goldman Sachs : The Great American Bubble Machine, helpfully posted up at Statism Watch , it's like "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money... If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain."

Matt Taibbi does the trick with the transparent cups :

The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest.

And why should you care? Well "the heads of the Canadian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York - which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman ..."

Penn and Teller, well, Penn, explains that one of the secrets of magic is to never repeat a trick for the same audience, but Taibbi tells us "Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - and they’re about to do it again." Good article.